Presumed Dead
Authors: Vince May
This book is a work of fiction. All names,
characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, brands, media and
incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are
fictitiously used. Any semblance to actual persons, living or dead, real events
or locales is entirely coincidental unless specifically indicated. The author
acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of various products
referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission.
The publication / use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or
sponsored by the trademark owners.
Kindle Edition
First eBook edition published 2014
This edition published April 2015
Copyright 2006 Vince May. All rights
reserved.
Cover art: Chris Peacock
eBook ISBN 978 1 311 26063 5
For the three women in my life: Sharon,
Carina and Gemma.
Remembering all the good times we’ve shared
in the mountains.
Dumped in the mountains.
Left for dead… by the man she loved.
Alice knew her husband didn’t love her very
much, but she never realized he actually hated her. Not until she found herself
left for dead high in the French Alps. After dragging herself to a refuge hut,
French mountaineer Philippe Dulac tends to her injuries and saves her life.
She knows that no one will believe her
husband tried to kill her. He’s too well respected and would have covered his
trail extremely well. She decides that if justice is to be done, she must remain
presumed dead
and prove his guilt personally.
Together with Philippe she sets out on a
quest for justice, which very soon goes horribly wrong…
“I almost looked at the end to check
everything worked out all right!”
---Cornerstones
PRESUMED
DEAD
Death in the mountains can come at you a
thousand different ways. Alice Webley knew that. She’d spent years relishing
the savage beauty of this hostile terrain. But nothing in her darkest dreams
had prepared her for the savagery of her own fate.
Suddenly she’s awake. Something has her by
the ankles. Hauling her face down towards the open door. A blast of freezing
air hits her, bringing her to her senses. She realizes for the first time
exactly where she is.
She’s being lifted, bent double. She screams
his name trying to make him stop. Kicking and punching she tries to fend off
the powerful hands propelling her towards the dark opening. But he’s much too
strong.
Moments later she’s tumbling head over
heels through space. Screaming as she falls into the black, freezing void.
Ross Webley drummed his fingers impatiently
on the side rail of the launch as it ploughed through the dark waters of Monte
Carlo harbor, out towards his host’s yacht: one hundred and fifty feet of
floodlit white steel and bronzed glass, riding gently at anchor in the bay.
This particular gin-palace was owned by
Riccardo Bonatti, a wealthy and extremely shady businessman out of Miami who
enjoyed hobnobbing with the rich and famous of Europe. Ross liked the totally
amoral American because he knew, deep down, they were two of a kind. Both of
them, beneath a thick, highly polished veneer of respectability and manners,
were hard, ruthless men who never let anything or anybody stand in the way of
what they wanted.
Ross felt comfortable around Bonatti and
often flew down from his home in the UK for weekend parties. Tonight though, he
was in no mood to party. He was already fuming at the time it had taken to get
the twenty miles from Nice airport. Unlike any other taxi he had ever been in,
the one he’d got only seemed to have two speeds, slow and stop. All Ross wanted
to do now was get on board the yacht and into his room so he could do some
private thinking.
Looking up ahead though, he could see
Bonatti waving at him from the top of the gangway and a noisy party in full
swing on the upper deck. Heaving an inward sigh at the thought of more delay,
he smiled and waved back, slipping effortlessly into his public image of a
wealthy international playboy.
As Ross reached the top of the gangway,
Bonatti pumped his hand and slapped him on the back. ‘Good to see you again,
you old son-of-a-gun! Where’s that beautiful young wife of yours? Didn’t you
bring her along?’
Ross forced a smile as he shook his old
friend’s hand. ‘No, we stopped off in Geneva on the way down. She’s hired a car
and driven up into mountains. Wanted to do some walking rather than come down
here.’
‘I think maybe Alice doesn’t approve of
me,’ Bonatti observed.
‘Nonsense! She thinks you’re a fine
fellow!’ Ross lied, remembering the last time Bonatti’s name had come up Alice
had called him a greasy pimp.
Bonatti laughed and slapped him on the back
again. ‘Come on, Ross, join the party. There are some people I want you to
meet, and we’ve got roulette and backgammon going on the lower deck.’
‘Look, Ricky, I’d love to, but you must let
me clean up and get changed first. I’ve been travelling all day and I smell
like a buffalo!’
Bonatti made a show of sniffing his friend,
then laughing heartily again, showed Ross to his quarters.
As soon as the crewman had deposited his
luggage and the door to the luxurious stateroom was shut, the smile slid from
Ross’s face and he delved franticly into his flight case. Pulling out a scale
ruler and a walking map of the Mont Blanc region, he spread it out on the table
and studied an area where he’d made some pencil crosses and lines.
Damn, he thought. There’s no way anyone’s
going to believe she climbed all the way up that glacier on her own in what she
was wearing. Then, looking closely at the map again and taking a measurement,
his eyes narrowed as he did some mental reckoning. After a few moments, he
reached into his pocket for his phone and dialed his wife’s cell phone.
The call was answered on the first ring.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ Ross growled. ‘Get your map out and I’ll tell you what
you’re
going to do about it.’
.
Consciousness came swimming back to Alice
after a while. She lay utterly still, not daring to move, her breath coming in
short gasps, hanging over her in white plumes on the freezing alpine air.
Wind resistance had slowed her forward
momentum, and she’d barely started to accelerate in free fall before she’d
slammed into the near vertical, snow covered ridge.
Bouncing, arms and legs flailing, she’d
tumbled fast and relentlessly down the steep mountainside for over a thousand
feet, grunting with each blow. Unable to stop. Incapable of helping herself.
Flooding with pain. Dimly aware of the battering she’d been taking.
As the snowfield had gradually leveled off,
she’d instinctively spread herself out flat, clawing at the soft snow,
desperately trying to slow herself down. It hadn’t done much good.
She’d been spun, twisted, bounced and
rolled for another six hundred agonizing feet before finally slithering to a
halt, face up in the snow at the top of the glacier like a discarded doll.
She’d felt crushed, bewildered, ragged,
abused… then mercifully thought had left her, and she’d felt nothing.
Now, in the perfect stillness, she could
hear her heart pounding wildly and her breath rasping in her throat. She could
see the bright moon and stars high above in the night sky, the silhouettes of
mountain peaks all around her.
As her mind started to clear, she suddenly
realized the enormity of what had happened. He tried to kill me! The words
built up into a scream in her head. Ross tried to kill me! She closed her eyes,
but in the giddying darkness behind her eyelids, all she could see was a
snapshot of her last memory of him. His contorted face bathed in red light. His
demonic eyes. She searched her mind for some small crevice to crawl into.
Somewhere to hide from the violence, the hatred she’d seen. But her head was
hurting so much it was all she could do to stay conscious.
An earlier version of herself, the Alice
Webley of a few years back, may have reacted differently. But now, as she lay
there sobbing uncontrollably, she slowly started to realize something: there
was nothing more he could do to her. She was no longer afraid of him.
The idea started as a tiny flame somewhere
deep inside her then quickly flared and ignited her anger. He’s done his worst,
played all his cards, shot his bolt, and he’s lost! He’s also not going to get
away with this, she thought, gritting her teeth. I’ll be damned if I let him
get away with it! Who the hell does he think he is?
She opened her eyes. ‘Move,’ she ordered
herself aloud. ‘You have to move.’ Carefully, she flexed each leg in turn, then
each arm. There didn’t seem to be any damage, at least, she didn’t feel any
sharp pains as she moved. Just an overall aching and stiffness that made her
feel like she’d been hit by a truck. The only thing that really worried her was
that she couldn’t move her right arm.
She sat up stiffly. After a few moments she
realized her telescopic aluminum walking pole was strapped to her right wrist
and she’d been laying on it. Then, looking down at her legs and along her arms,
she saw that she was wearing all her walking gear, right down to her rucksack
and Baby G watch! The last thing she remembered, she’d been wearing a lemon
yellow skirt and jacket with matching stilettos!
Looking around, she tried to figure out
where she was. Stretching high above was the almost sheer face she’d just
fallen down. Far to her left and right were outcrops of jagged rock, whilst
below all she could see was a gentle white slope, disappearing out of view into
the darkness. She could tell by the sheer scale of the landscape and the feel
of the air that she was in the Alps, but where exactly, she didn’t have a clue.
There was one thing she was sure about though: realistically, she was going
nowhere but down.
Carefully she rolled over, and with a
groan, stood up leaning heavily on her walking pole. Her legs and pole sunk
straight into the soft snow. It was obvious she wasn’t going to be able to walk
on this stuff. She started to make her way down the incline on her bottom with
a shuffling motion, digging the heels of her boots into the snow to control her
speed as she went.
As she gradually slid and shuffled down the
slope, the snow started to get harder and more crystalline until it finally
gave way to solid ice. Sliding down was easier now, faster, but she’d only gone
a short way when she realized the surface of the glacier was embedded with
small shards of granite that were ripping at her hands and the soft flesh of
her buttocks.
She tried to stand again, but each time she
took a step, her rubber-soled boots slipped and she fell. She realized walking
was going to be impossible, so pulling the arms of her fleece jacket down over
her hands, she set off down the ice on all fours, trying to avoid the worst of
the sharp stones. She knew that if she followed the glacier down, it would
eventually lead into a valley, and a valley in these parts invariably meant
people and help.
She slipped and crawled and slithered for
over an hour, constantly looking down the slope in the hope of seeing some end
to the massive river of ice. The protection of the fleece she’d pulled over her
hands worked at first, but before long the cloth was shredded and her flesh was
gashed and bleeding. On top of that, despite all her exertion, the intense cold
was starting to affect her. She was deeply chilled. Her bare legs, her hands,
her face, especially the tips of her ears and nose, were painfully frozen and
she was starting to become disorientated.
Once she thought she saw a light below in
the distance, but she slipped, and by the time she’d recovered it was gone.
Then, after a few seconds, it was there again!
Soon she could make out a wooden hut
perched on a huge pile of boulders with light streaming from its solitary
window. The final path to the hut was up a steep stairway formed from flat
granite blocks. Looking up with despair, she wondered how she was ever going to
make it. Gritting her teeth, she eased herself down and sat on the bottom step,
then gradually, one step at a time, hauled herself up until she was leaning
against the small wooden door in a slowly accumulating pool of blood.
Mechanically, with the ground now tilting
left and right below her, she raising a frozen, bloodstained fist and pounded
on the door with what little strength she had left.
After a few seconds, Alice felt the door
swing open. She was just trying to form the words, ‘Help me,’ when the floor of
the hut came rushing up and hit her in the face.